Garden Update

Its been modestly warm here recently (mid-upper 30's), so much of the snow we've had has now melted. The grass and hairy vetch are both matted and flattened onto the ground, but both look quite green. I'm getting worried about the grass. Its an annual and is supposed to die off over the winter, but it looks fine so far. Hopefully it won't start growing in the spring. If it does, it will be a serious pest for my vegetables!

Speaking of vegetables, my mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Thompson & Morgan seed company for Christmas! I've been looking through it and trying to figure out what to grow. There is a bunch of stuff I'd like to try out, but I've got to consider how much space I'll have and what vegetables I'm already going to have a lot of.

This past year I got a partial share at the Genesee Valley Organic Community Supported Agriculture. I liked having a lot of random veggies. It forced me to eat more vegetables and to try things I've never had before. It was borderline too much vegetables for me, but now that I'm living with Jaime, the partial share should be a reasonable amount. Besides, there's no guarantee that my garden will produce well, or at all, so I think we'll do a partial share again. I also don't mind supporting a few local farmers and getting reasonably priced organic food. One thing that I definitely remember having too much of last summer was lettuce. Every week I would get one or two heads. The cool wet weather last summer was probably part of the reason I got so much lettuce, but I don't see any reason for me to grow any normal lettuce in my garden if I'm doing the CSA again. Less common but really tasty stuff like Arugula...sure.

Then I had to figure out how much space I have for different kinds of vegetables, so I went out back and measured the yard. After that, I made a google spreadsheet and colored it to the dimensions of the yard. Its just like sketching it out on graph paper, but its a lot easier to change and modify. In the picture below, each grid line is 6". The black areas are the outlines of the usable space, the grey areas are theoretically usable, but are partially or fully shaded. South is basically towards the upper-left corner, maybe at 11 o'clock. The green areas are unplanted areas for walking. All the white sections are for different vegetables. Hopefully you can read what they say. Just to give some perspective, from the left edge to the right edge in the picture is about 23ft, and from top to bottom is about 17ft.

It turns out that there is quite a bit of space back there for a garden, and if everything grows well (highly unlikely), I'll be giving away vegetables. I figure its a good idea to try a bunch of different veggies and see what does or doesn't grow well. If anybody has any suggestions for what I should/shouldn't grow, let me know.